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Note: This is a student project from a course affiliated
with the Ethnography of the University Initiative. EUI supports faculty development of courses
in which students conduct original research on their university, and encourages students to
think about colleges and universities in relation to their communities and within larger
national and global contexts.

ACE 398, Research Methods for Consumer Economics and Finance, Prof. Mary Arends-Kuenning: This course was designed as a critical inquiry course, where students came up with questions that they wanted to answer and then learned how to answer them. As part of the Ethnography of the University (EUI) initiative at the University of Illinois (http://www.eui.uiuc.edu/) students created new knowledge about the university, with the goal that their research would become part of a permanent archive for other students and researchers to use in the future. The research questions they defined focused on the topics of the savings, consumption, and time allocation behavior of University of Illinois students. As a class, students collected both qualitative and quantitative data to answer their research questions. Qualitative data included data from in-depth interviews and from focus group discussions. Quantitative data involved data that could be codified and analyzed using statistical methods. To this end, students collected quantitative data through use of an online survey. Finally, students analyzed their data and produced research papers. The course syllabus is available at: http://www.eui.uiuc.edu/docs/syllabi/ACE398F08.pdf.

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Student Communities and CultureThe university offers an extraordinary opportunity to study and document student communities, life, and culture. This collection includes research on the activities, clubs, and durable social networks that comprise sometimes the greater portion of the university experience for students.